How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Laura Cusick

ResearchI used the search engine ‘Google’ when researching thriller films, thriller posters and also double page spreads. This gave us a wide and reliable way of relating the typical forms and conventions into our film.YouTube and a YouTube convertor website was used to find the music for our film and convert it into a suitable file for our editing software. Without YouTube we wouldn’t of been able to have as much choice or access to songs and it would have given a different and less effective feel to our film.

I used Google maps to find different locations to shoot our film in. We were able to get 360 views and different angles so that we could envision filming there. This was very helpful as otherwise we would have had to waste time actually visiting each location first to see if it had the right atmosphere and look for our film.

Equipment Our film was captured on my Canon 550D. With the 1080P filming quality and the different amount of lenses we had available, it made this camera a good choice to use. Using my camera instead of one offered by our school meant that we had access to it whenever we needed and were able to reshoot and edit things from our homes and therefore didn’t always have to wait until our media lessons. It was also helpful in the sense that I knew how to use it straight away and didn’t waste time getting use to the camera and trying to enable different settings etc.

We also used a tripod for some of our film scenes for example the long shots of our main character running in the woods. We used a tripod to get a professional look and so that each clip would be stable. However we didn’t use the tripod when filming our point of view shots and we wanted these to be unsettled and shaky to represent and reinforce the main characters feelings at that time – this was captured through hand held filming. If we hadn’t of had access to a tripod it would have been very difficult and unsafe to try and balance the camera on stable ground or we would have had to produce the whole film using hand held filming techniques – which wouldn’t of looked that good.

Programmes Adobe Premier ProWe used Adobe Premier Pro to edit our whole film. It was the best programme to use as it allowed us to do everything that we wanted to achieve during the editing stages – for example putting our film in black and white, cropping certain clips, and changing those clips to run backwards.

Black & WhiteTo edit our clips into black and white, we selected the ‘Video effects’ panel and selected ‘colour correction’ and then the black and white effects under ‘Tint’. We then dragged that certain effect over the clip that we wanted to change. This was really useful as we could edit the colour clip by clip, therefore leaving the clips that we wanted in colour.

Cropping When we had uploaded our filming work onto premier pro, some of the clips were far too long, some had bloopers at the end etc. and we therefore had to crop certain sections. To do this we selected a starting point and an ending point and then dragged the new selected section into our work base and saved it as a new clip.

Backwards The first half of our film was backwards, in order to build tension and to reveal the beginning at the end. To do this we had to click on each clip that we wanted to reverse and select speed and duration, we then clicked on reverse speed and then could choose how fast or slow we wanted it to run, depending on what was happening in a certain clip.

Adobe Photoshop I used Photoshop to create my magazine article as I was able to use different tools in creating my magazine article..

I used the ruler tool to separate the page into two, and then added columns of text and a title. I also used different font tools to make the questions bold and the answers in a normal font.

I was then able to place my photograph and change the colour to black and white etc.

I also used photoshop to create my poster. I used the shape tool to create a rectangular shape over the models mouth and added text to it. I then was able to make stars with this shape tool. I added different gradients and used the filter gallery to create a colourful glow. Photoshop was the best programme to use as I was able to control each layer and decide where I wanted the underlay of colour to be. It was also very simple to flatten my image in order to save it as one final piece.